The interview process for SWEs is changing very quickly, and if you want to land a job, it’s best you understand it.
I'm going to break this up into two segments, one for big tech and one for startups because they're diverging pretty fast.
Let's start with big tech:
You've probably seen layoff headlines every week, but the reality is these companies are still hiring fairly aggressively. (especially above junior level) Amazon has been in my Inbox every week with everything from CyberSec to MLE jobs (which I am NOT qualified for lol), and many of my close friends have recently cleared the loop at Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
You’d think this + data across the web would let me tell you exactly what the process is like, BUT the interesting part is the interview process for these companies is becoming less and less standard as companies try to adapt to how engineers actually work in 2026.
Let’s start with the base case: Many orgs & teams are still following the very standard loop:
Online assessment (leetcode style, could be on codesignal or hackerrank)
Phone screen (quick pulse check, possibly a basic question or two on your field)
Technical round (coding interview with a single engineer, LC style or otherwise)
Onsite (remote though lol) (2-5 interviews, mix of coding, system design, and behavioral)
Team match (you’ve cleared the general loop for a company, now a team needs to pick you)
If I were a gambling man, I’d bet you’re next big tech loop would look roughly like that. However, things are changing fast and there are a few other things I’d be on the look out for.
Tracing / debugging. This can be in the place of a coding or technical round and is much closer to a system design question than it is a leetcode question. Interviewers want to see if you can reason about how a request flows through a system, where it might break, what you might change to fix it, etc. If you want to practice for this, read postmortems (cloudflare blog is a good example), and practice system design (the daily dev is a good resource for this).
AI Coding. This is still quite rare, but Meta in particular is starting to assess this. They want to know how you interact with AI when trying to accomplish a task. Do you give it a megaprompt and start another agent to get things done quicker? Or do you stick with small prompts and review the output carefully? I don’t think there’s a right answer to this yet. Make sure you understand the company culture and you have your own opinions on how you work with these tools. I suggest just trying to build with SOTA tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc) and just being familiar with them and how they work.
Behavioral. This has always existed to some extent, but it’s becoming more of a differentiator as people start to focus more on human relationships as a “zag” to the AI craze. Focus on having clear stories about how you work with people (STAR) and just being a nice and interesting person during the interview. People want to hire someone they would WANT to work with every day. Practice your STAR stories with a friend and have them ask follow ups. Really hard to nail this one alone.
So how should you prep?
LeetCode. Sadly LC is still very relevant. Most coding interviews do not allow any AI of any kind, and no competitors have emerged to challenge this. I’d prioritize this above ALL else until you’re confident you can clear the initial OA or coding round.
Build stuff. Interviewers are increasingly looking for people who know how to build, scale, and manage actual systems. If you have never built an API, deployed a database, or looked through a log, you’re going to have a REALLY hard time answering any questions around these topics (which are increasingly common). Added benefit is you can build stuff and add it to your resume.
Read postmortems. I mentioned this, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. If you can’t get real world experience breaking prod, you need to understand how it happens and how it should be handled.
The Daily Dev. This is my app, it’s built to keep you consistent with daily system design questions & hand picked articles + deep dives which cover the question of the day. If you’d prefer to do your own practice, set an alarm for the same time every day, pick a system design topic (ie caching, failure handling, load balancers, scaling, docker, …) and read some literature on it, then quiz yourself.
Next week I’ll write about the startup process so keep your eyes peeled!
P.S. we’ve received a lot of awesome feedback for The Daily Dev! If you’re looking to practice system design, give it a shot, I built it for people exactly like you.
